


circles in the sand

by sannlykke



Series: SASO 2017 [3]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-11 05:29:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11141934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sannlykke/pseuds/sannlykke
Summary: “Even if they can, you know what the legends say, don’t you? If there’s any truth to these tales of transformations, it is that each of them is invariably a curse.”





	circles in the sand

**Author's Note:**

> written for [this prompt](http://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org/21931.html?thread=11194027#cmt11194027) for saso2017 br1: merfolk au
> 
> does anyone else remember the jj lin song about mermaids bc thats where i jacked the title from lol
> 
> also **warnings** for drowning, implied violence

He could hear them calling his name even here, hidden behind a curtain of seaweed in the little cove where he keeps to himself most days. It’s annoying, and bound to attract attention if they keep it up; Chihiro resolves to shove his face back into his book and ignore Kotarou’s screeching.  
  
Water laps at Chihiro’s elbows as he shifts position, letting his tail submerge as he flips another page. Not the most comfortable position in the world, but he’s gotta be quick in case something happens. He’s not supposed to be here, not supposed to even have access to these books. It’s something categorically forbidden to their kind, as are most other human objects, but what does it matter when nobody will find out anyway?  
  
Chihiro has a habit—almost a skill, if one will—of evading others’ gaze. Maybe it’s more physical than anything—the dull grey of his hair and tail-fins do not stand out as brightly in these subtropical waters. His acquaintances—Kotarou insists they are _friends_ , perhaps by the most tenuous definition of the word—prefer being in the open water, no more closer to home but away from the shore dotted with human activity. They would never think of looking for him here.  
  
He gets another chapter and a half into a tale of an alien girl meeting a high schooler before the shadow above his head suddenly disappears, the sun shining directly onto his page. Chihiro jerks his head up in surprise, and sees the face of a young boy peeking out at him from behind the lifted seaweed.  
  
“Hello,” he says, his smile sharp as a knife. “I’m Seijuurou. You’re a merman, aren’t you?”

 

  
  
“Nobody will believe you,” Chihiro says. He’s still holding his novel, but his mind is the furthest place from that story right now.  
  
“Why do you think I’ll tell anyone?” Seijuurou says, still sitting far away from him, the way Chihiro prefers it. It’s difficult to tell how old humans are; merfolk live long lives, but only if they don’t get caught. “I’m the only one who comes here.”  
  
“Then leave?”  
  
“How did you get a book?” asks Seijuurou, ignoring his question. He comes a little closer. “Did you steal it? Won’t they get wet?”  
  
“You’d be surprised how many people leave their shit on the beach,” Chihiro replies, before realizing he’s doing so. “Why’s that so interesting to you anyway? You humans have enough of them.”  
  
“I didn’t know mermaids could read.”  
  
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know. What are you, eight? Nine?”  
  
“I’m ten.” And then, “You haven’t told me your name.”  
  
“Don’t need to.” Chihiro shoves the book back into the crevice, where even the highest tides do not reach. Seijuurou reaches out, lightning fast, and plucks it out of his hand. “Hey!”  
  
“I’m taking this if you don’t tell me,” Seijuurou says, scooting backwards, holding the book tightly against his chest. He’s too far away for Chihiro to reach without maneuvering himself onto the rocky outcrop, and Seijuurou knows this too. It’s too dangerous for him to show himself fully, even to a child. “You want it back, don’t you?”  
  
 _Imperious little shit,_ Chihiro thinks. He has other books, hidden in various other places along this stretch of shoreline where even the highest of tides do not reach. But something—maybe the mischievous glint in Seijuurou’s scarlet eyes—tells him none of those are safe anymore, not after today. He glares at the child for a few moments. “Chihiro. Give it back.”  
  
Seijuurou tosses the book back at him. “There. Not so hard, is it? I need to go now.”  
  
“Good riddance.”  
  
He stops in the middle of climbing back up to the grass, looking back. “…Will I see you again tomorrow?”  
  
Chihiro snorts, carefully re-inserting the book back into its hiding place. “Yeah, no.”

 

  
  
Seijuurou—Akashi Seijuurou, his full name is—stays in a nearby mansion his family had recently bought. He’s never been given enough permission to explore the grounds fully, and so he sneaks out every now and then when he could. Chihiro hadn’t cared to learn this, but there is no telling the boy to shut up without being threatened with either his existence being exposed or his books being taken away.  
  
At the very least, Seijuurou does not seem much interested in eating him, or selling him off, or whatever it is their legends say of merfolk being caught in fishermens’ nets. Chihiro nods noncommittally as he turns another page, the boy swinging his legs in the water nearby. “So you’re a rich kid. No wonder you’re a brat.”  
  
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”  
  
Chihiro doesn’t have much of a say in what he can pick up on the beach, but his favorites are light novels: easy to consume in one sitting, with accompanying pictures every now and then. Seijuurou reminds him of certain character archetypes—the demanding school council president, the arrogant young master the heroine somehow develops a reluctant liking to.   
  
“I’m not a nice person,” Chihiro says. “I’m not even a person.”  
  
“You _are,_ ” Seijuurou says. “You’re the only person who would talk to me, anyway.”  
  
Chihiro’s about to fire off another retort about how he’s really the only one talking Chihiro’s ears off, but then he glances up and sees the look on Seijuurou’s face. “You don’t have any…friends, around here?”  
  
Seijuurou shakes his head. “I’m here with Father and Mother. I’m not allowed to meet the other children, unless we’re having a party.”  
  
“And so you’re here, meeting me.”  
  
“I’m free from two to four,” Seijuurou says. “It’s easy to slip Mother’s sleeping pills into my tutor’s tea. I always finish the work the night before, anyhow.”  
  
Chihiro raises an eyebrow. “Can’t say I’m not impressed.”

 

  
  
Seijuurou leaves at the end of summer, promising a return the next year. It’s not so different from how arctic merfolk travel to the southern seas in winter, Chihiro decides. However difficult Seijuurou is, Chihiro has learned quite a deal about humans listening to the kid talk, filling in the gaps of his knowledge that had come mostly from his books and watching them interact from afar.  
  
“Hey,” Kotarou says, swimming up to him one day not long after, his black-and-gold fins shimmering beautifully under the sunlight. “You were kind of gone all summer.”  
  
“You’ve got Reo and Eikichi to entertain you,” Chihiro replies, frowning. Between this and interacting with Seijuurou, he’s not been able to finish a single book all summer. “I like my quiet.”  
  
“You do.” Then Kotarou drops his voice, which is at once surprising and slightly alarming. “You’ve been staying too close to the shore, haven’t you? Watching people or something.”  
  
Chihiro stares at him. “That’s none of your business. I’ve never gotten caught.”  
  
Kotarou shrugs. “Hey, yeah, none of my business. But you better not get caught, otherwise Reo-nee’s gonna be mad.”  
  
“Whatever.”  
  
He watches Kotarou swim back to where the rest of them are, getting ready to go hunting for dinner. At this time of the year the fish are plentiful enough that they stay here, though come winter the shoal would pack up and head down to their winter territory in the islands hundreds of miles away.   
  
Chihiro’s not afraid of them or anyone else in their group; they’re apt to forget he’s even there anyway, if he just stops showing up. Chihiro doesn’t want to become a stray, though it’s not uncommon for folks to split off and go their own way. He’s not the strongest or fastest swimmer or anything, but being pretty much invisible is always a good thing in face of predators.  
  
Seijuurou would not be here until next summer, anyway. He follows Kotarou, reluctantly, down to the ocean bed.

 

  
  
He comes back year after year, sometimes for the entire stretch of summer, sometimes only for a few weeks. And it is somewhere along the way Chihiro starts, however reluctantly, realizing he is looking forward to these meetings.  
  
Seijuurou is a busy child after all, quickly becoming a busy teenager. He talks about his violin lessons, events his family attends, and horseback riding. Chihiro had never seen a horse before, not even a picture, and the day after Seijuurou talks about this he returns with a photograph of a beast white as snow.  
  
(At some point Chihiro notices Seijuurou does not talk about his mother anymore, but he does not ask, and Seijuurou does not explain.)  
  
“Hey,” Seijuurou says, one day. It’s a sunny day, the waters warm and pleasant, and Chihiro had long since given up on trying to finish the copy of Pygmalion the kid had brought for him. “Do mermaids live forever?”  
  
“What, you want to become one?” Chihiro snorts. “Usually it’s the other way around in human stories, isn’t it.”  
  
“I don’t see why you would want to become human,” Seijuurou says, frowning. He looks at the water, at Chihiro’s shimmering scales beneath the waves. “When you’re human, you get old, get sick. You die, after only a couple decades.”  
  
It’s not what Chihiro had expected coming out of his mouth. Usually Seijuurou is more composed than this, more logical—Chihiro knows there’s more to it than simply that, so he waits.  
  
“My mother,” Seijuurou says, his voice catching. “She’s been unwell, since last year. Not to the extent that needs permanent hospitalization yet, but…”  
  
Chihiro knows humans have doctors in the way merfolk have the sea—doctors that hook humans up to monstrous metal contraptions that pump life back into them, stick them with needles to heal their wounds. The sea is all merfolk need for a doctor. There is no hidden magic like the humans seem to think they have, but the knowledge of how to make seaweed bind to one’s skin until one is healed, or how to coax anemone into secreting just the right amount of poison to combat their infections. “What’s she sick with?”  
  
“I don’t know. Father won’t tell me, and the doctors can’t find the source.”  
  
 _I don’t know._ Rare words from the mouth of Akashi Seijuurou. Awkwardly, Chihiro leans forward until he’s inches from the boy. Seijuurou’s fourteen now, taller, his feet touching the shallow sands from where he sits. The angles of his face are sharper, his red hair fanning out like flames in the sunlight. There’s a sort of melancholy there rarely seen before, and a set to his jaw that tells Chihiro there is really nothing he could do about it.  
  
Chihiro says, “I can’t give you a magic potion to cure her or whatever. I don’t know any sea witches who can do that, either.  
  
 _“Even if they can, you know what the legends say, don’t you? If there’s any truth to these tales of transformations, it is that each of them is invariably a curse.”_  
  
Seijuurou stares at him fully, his eyes entrancing—it’s almost a little scary how vivid the color is, Chihiro thinks. Something’s different though, something that he’s noticed before but never as strongly as now—a different slant of light in his left eye.  
  
“Is that so?” he says finally, exhaling, and Chihiro sees the glint leave. “I see. My apologies for asking. It is foolish of me to think such a thing could help.”  
  
Chihiro shrugs uncomfortably. “Yeah, well. It’s better if you knew sooner rather than later.”  
  
(When he goes to sleep that night, he dreams of red, red, _red._ )

 

  
  
Seijuurou starts coming less and less over the years, his schedule and that conversation buried beneath layers of sand and sediment keeping him in the world where he ought to belong. But for Chihiro, whose own time passes ever so slowly, he is no less drawn to the rocky outcrop and sandy beaches as he were a decade ago.   
  
And that is how they find out.  
  
“Chihiro, what the _fuck_ —“  
  
He does nothing but gives all of them his sullenest glare as Reo swims up to him, eyes wide with fright and anger. “Is this what you’ve been doing all this time? Swimming so close to—to humans?”  
  
“I see nothing wrong with that.”  
  
“You see nothing wrong with constantly putting yourself in danger? Putting all of us—“  
  
Chihiro stares him down. “This has nothing to do with any of you. Why do you care? If I get caught—”  
  
Reo grabs him by the arm, yanking him close, and it _hurts._ “How do you think we’ve survived for this long, huh? We might be nothing more than stories now, but if they catch one of us, find out we _exist_ —if you’re gone all the time, how would we know? How could we hide if we don’t even know what’s coming?”  
  
“Then go,” Chihiro says, wrenching his arm away. “Winter is soon, isn’t it? Leave without me.”  
  
Behind them, he can see Kotarou and Eikichi exchange looks. It’s none of his business anymore, Chihiro thinks, turning around to go. Reo does not follow him as he heads down deep for his own bed of kelp, letting the long, thick strands envelope him.  
  
Seijuurou never comes here in the winter. He knows that. He knows that, and more, and still—he waits.

 

 

One stormy winter night it happens, as Chihiro keeps to the deep sea for cover, alone.  
  
He doesn’t realize it at first, thinking it the crashing of waves and howling wind, but the impossible sound travelling towards him from the surface of the ocean— _no, it can’t be_.  
  
Hesitantly, he swims upwards, careful not to get caught in the updraft of swirling water, and he sees a large, dark shape. It’s a ship, he thinks as he nears, and it’s—  
  
In the water there are many smaller dark shapes, falling objects, electronics and purses among the debris of metal and wood. Avoiding all of those, Chihiro looks up and sees lightning briefly illuminating the water above him.  
  
He also sees red hair.  
  
 _It can’t be,_ Chihiro continues thinking, even as his body is already moving towards the body. Seijuurou is twenty now, a man, almost too much for Chihiro to haul, but he does so anyway. They break the surface, and immediately Chihiro hears Seijuurou cough through the resounding sound of the waves beating against the wreck.  
  
“What the _hell,_ ” Chihiro whispers as he drags both of them away from the ship, from the storm. “What are you _doing_ here—“  
  
Seijuurou does not respond, his head turned to one side. Chihiro stops briefly, making sure he’s facing the sky, before going on. The storm begins to quiet as they near the shore where Chihiro had met him all those years ago, and the scrapes on his skin start to hurt as he, out of breath, heaves Seijuurou onto the shore. The waves lap at his feet gently, as if all of what had transpired had been but a dream.  
  
“Hey,” Chihiro whispers, slapping his face. “Hey, fuck, wake _up_ —“  
  
Seijuurou does not answer him, though water is dribbling slightly out of his mouth. Chihiro shakes him violently, wishing with every passing moment he would know how to do—but he does not. Sea creatures do not drown, do not fear drowning; humans do, and too easily.   
  
He leans down to listen to Seijuurou’s heartbeat, and his own heart stills.  
  
“No—“  
  
Frantically Chihiro looks around, at the empty stretch of shore for something, anything. He spots the glint off a glass bottle buried in the shallow sandbar, and moves towards it, yanking it out. It is broken—good.  
  
He moves towards Seijuurou, whose eyes are still closed, his body becoming colder and colder in the wintry temperatures. Some legends, Chihiro thinks bitterly as he closes his own eyes and cuts down on his finger, are true after all.  
  
The first drop of blood does nothing but seep into Seijuurou’s lips, staining them; the second causes him to wake, spluttering, coughing out the water in his lungs as soon as he swallowed it. He gasps for air, fingers digging into the soft sand, and then turns around, eyes alighting on Chihiro’s face. His eyes, Chihiro sees, are clearly different colors in the moonlight.  
  
“Chihiro.”  
  
“Yeah, me,” Chihiro replies. He turns away, ready to dive back into the ocean and out of the mess he had just created for himself, but Seijuurou’s already caught his arm, just like how he’d grabbed his book a decade ago. “Let go of me.”  
  
“You saved my life.”  
  
“Does it matter?”  
  
Seijuurou is, Chihiro finds, much stronger now than he was as a child, as he feels himself jerked backwards and Seijuurou’s lips upon his in the next moment. He tastes like sea-salt, like the rust upon a ships’ hull, electric and terrifying and not at all what Chihiro had expected.  
  
 _Had he been expecting this, after all?_  
  
Seijuurou is shivering too, wet fabric hugging his skin. His arms are wrapped around Chihiro’s bare back, still cold but offering more warmth than Chihiro had known human touch would come with. Of course he had never been expecting this; it is foolish, dangerous, outrageous—  
  
“Chihiro,” Seijuurou whispers into his mouth, his eyes still closed. Chihiro still tastes salt, but this time he realizes it is not the seawater crushed against his cheek. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“What the hell are you sorry for?” Chihiro asks, and it is then he knows he is a goner.

 

  
  
Chihiro watches from his hiding place as the medical personnel lead Seijuurou away, wrapped in blankets with a cup of hot something in his hands. The sinking, he’d overheard, had been completely unexpected—it had been a chartered cruise coming down from Tokyo, and it had found itself caught in a rare freak storm. These don’t usually happen in winter, Chihiro knows—winter cruises, or winter storms.  
  
The people used to say capturing a _ningyo_ was bad luck, cursing the fishermen who brought it overboard onto their ships, attracting misfortune to anyone desperate enough to feast upon its flesh. The legends never talked about those who gave what was theirs willingly, but Chihiro could surmise neither intention nor opposition would stop what would happen from happening.  
  
He wonders when Seijuurou will realize what he has done.

 

  
  
Seijuurou does not come back the following summer, and neither does Chihiro’s shoal.  
  
The storm had washed away some of Chihiro’s stash, but he can always find more on the beach. But he does not go so near now, preferring to stay in the shallows around the other side of the bend, away from where Seijuurou used to look for him.  
  
 _You could move on, like the rest of your kin. He’s never coming back, not after what you’ve done to him._  
  
Still, he stays, until one autumn day.  
  
Chihiro had been resting under an outcrop of rock when he is roughly awoken by sounds coming from above, unfamiliar human voices save for one.  
  
“Are you sure it’s around here?”  
  
“Yes, I’m sure.”  
  
He lies still, very still, as the shadows pass overhead. All men—two tall men Chihiro has never seen before, armed with long metal sticks. One shorter, his red hair reflected on the glasslike surface of the sea. They do not come down to grab him, haul him into a vehicle and ship him to a lab, stab him with needles. Not yet.  
  
 _The only person you cursed was yourself,_ comes a whisper in the back of his mind, gleeful. _Did you think he was going to be different from the rest of them? Once he tasted resurrection, did you not think he would be back for the whole package?_  
  
The voices and footsteps grow fainter, fainter, until they are gone altogether. Chihiro feels his heart slow to the point where he doesn’t even know if it’s beating anymore. He should leave, he decides. Leave now, before they come back to double check. He’s pretty much invisible in any case, and if he were quick about it—  
  
“Don’t move.”  
  
“I ought to have let you drown,” Chihiro says dully. He feels the point of a knife touch his skin between the ribs, where one well-aimed stab would paralyze him for good. Seijuurou’s good at this; it’s likely he’s done this many times over, if only metaphorically. “Do you want to curse your mother too?”  
  
“I see no curse, Chihiro.”  
  
“Then,” Chihiro says, holding his hands up, gazing out at nothing over the wide expanse of the sea. “You will.”

 

  
  
They put him in a tank deep inside the mansion, unknown to the outside world. He learns new words— _aerating_ , _synthesis_ , _anaphylactic shock._ When Seijuurou visits, he does not look at the tank but at the men in white coats, asking them questions Chihiro could not hear from where he is.  
  
They are very careful about what they want, drawing blood only infrequently, cutting only the smallest amounts of flesh. The tank is big, the fish they give him big and fresh. It is not a bad environment, or a bad life by the technical definition of the word, had he been born into it.  
  
Chihiro watches them try and fail, try and fail. He watches Seijuurou’s expression become stonier and less pleasant, his eyes so sharp Chihiro finds it surprising the doctors are able to talk him down. His mother’s situation, Chihiro learns, is so dire she had been in a coma for three days now.  
  
And it becomes apparent Seijuurou either realizes or gives in to what the situation is when Chihiro wakes one morning to see him standing in front of the tank.  
  
“You,” Seijuurou says.  
  
“Yes,” Chihiro says. “Me.”  
  
“How did you do it,” Seijuurou asks, through the glass. He does not climb the ladder, and Chihiro does not surface. “How am I alive, but this doesn’t work for my mother?”  
  
Chihiro smiles, sharp teeth and all. “Shouldn’t you know what you’re missing by now?”  
  
Seijuurou’s eyes are so bright Chihiro thinks he might be set aflame just looking at them, but he isn’t, and neither of them say a word as the man steps forward, pressing his face into the glass. “Chihiro. You…”  
  
“That’s right,” Chihiro says, pressing his own hands to the glass. “That’s right, Seijuurou. Bring her here.”

 

  
  
“You can do whatever you want with him,” Seijuurou tells the doctors as he wheels his mother away, the woman on the wheelchair disoriented but alive. “Just keep this place clean.”  
  
That night, the first night of winter, there is a storm. Chihiro can hear it all the way at the bottom of his tank, nursing the wounds on his body. It had not been as bad as he thought it would be, but not as bad is still bad.   
  
For the first time in many nights there is only one doctor in the room, dozing on a chair. Chihiro is still watching him when the door opens.  
  
“Chihiro.”  
  
He does not respond, until he looks up to see the Seijuurou standing there is looking at him with an expression he has not seen in years. Scarlet eyes—two of them. Chihiro narrows his eyes. “What the hell do you want.”  
  
Seijuurou swallows. He looks reasonably distressed—guilty even, but plenty of people can fake guilty—Chihiro thinks about the apology he received on the sandbar, and he feels something twist inside his stomach. “I’m letting you go.”  
  
“Bullshit. You captured me, put me in this fucking—“  
  
“Be quiet, you’ll wake him up,” Seijuurou hisses, already standing on top of the ladder. Chihiro stares at him. “There’s a roller outside, I can get you to the car.”  
  
Chihiro bites his words back, staring at him. There’s an earnestness in his face that Chihiro’s long forgotten about, different from the sharp edges of the other Seijuurou. _A trap_ , his gut tells him, but what choice does he have anyway? He reaches out and grabs Seijuurou’s hand.  
  
For a fraction of a second their eyes meet, and the thought runs through Chihiro’s head: _if I pull, I can hold him down until his pretty eyes cloud over, until no sound comes out of those lips ever again. Nobody will hear a thing. I can make it quick._   
  
Instead, he lets Seijuurou pull him out of the water. “What are you waiting for?”

 

  
  
He thinks of what Reo had told him, months and years ago, time and space blurring into nothing as Seijuurou carries him down to the beach as the rain pelts down around them. _How could we hide if we don’t know what’s coming?_  
  
 _You already knew this was coming, and still you did not run._  
  
“I was fucking stupid,” Chihiro says, as Seijuurou lowers him into the water. The wind in his hair makes it impossible to see his face, but Chihiro knows he is listening. He shivers, the saltwater stinging his skin as he is submerged. “I shouldn’t have talked to you. So were you, you know. Talking to a goddamned stranger.”  
  
“My parents told me to never to talk to strangers, yes.”  
  
Seijuurou kneels, his knees buried in the soft sand. Chihiro looks at him; both of them are soaked, but this look only suits one of them. He reaches out, touching Seijuurou’s wet hair, wondering how it would feel if he were to pull all of it out until he sees blood.   
  
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Seijuurou begins, his voice barely a whisper in the howling wind. Even now there is something dangerous about him; but once freed from a lifelong journey of finding a cure, Chihiro can see less fire and more water. Were he to have time to recover, he could and would certainly move on. “I do not deserve it, anyhow.”  
  
In the darkness Chihiro could not tell what colors his eyes are—then again, perhaps it had just been his own hallucinations after all. It does not matter who or how Seijuurou is anymore; all that does is that they are here, drowning in the rain.   
  
“Everything is in absolutes to you, isn’t it?”  
  
Seijuurou looks up, startled. Chihiro smiles, leaning in.  
  
“If you think setting me free is redemption,” he murmurs in Seijuurou’s ear, “You don’t know what the doctors have been talking about, do you, while you were gone?  
  
“Do you know how many of them are preparing to look for more like me, after you free them from your service? How we all have to flee now, even those of us who know nothing, that soon the world will know about us.  
  
“I don’t care about the others,” Chihiro says, his lips on Seijuurou’s neck, “We were already cursed from the beginning. But you—”  
  
“But I,” Seijuurou says, looking at him softly, the rain running in rivulets down his face. He looks lost, in all senses of the word. “What can I do?”  
  
“You,” Chihiro says, tugging at his arm, “will come with me.”

 

  
  
He does not know if Seijuurou had wanted this, if this is what he had meant when he had been all of a child on the beach, staring longingly out at the sea. As soon as they hit the water Chihiro sees him cough, and he tugs at Seijuurou’s body roughly. He is not used to this, but he will be.  
  
There is no trail of blood coming out of the cut in Chihiro’s arm, bound by seaweed. It would heal eventually, but they must get out before the sharks move in after the storm.  
  
 _I’m going to drown,_ he can see Seijuurou’s eyes say as they are swept further out into the deep, _Is this what you wanted from me?_  
  
 _I don’t want you to die_ , Chihiro says, through the motions of his tail, sharp strokes cutting the water. _And you won't. Not out here, alone, like what would’ve happened to me._  
  
Seijuurou laughs wordlessly, the bubbles coming out of his mouth like a trail of pearls, his eyes telling a different story. When Chihiro looks down, all he can see is the boy of fourteen again, helpless, lost in the waves. He smiles, parts fond and disdainful, and waits for him to catch up.  
  
The only difference is the scarlet tail fanning out beneath the waves, shimmering flames visible even in the deepest chasms of the sea.


End file.
